Monday, September 19, 2016

I find that I cannot write about modern India without dealing
with a mischievous little (ish – he wasn’t nearly as tiny as most people
imagine) imp who went by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The man was a
walker. It was something that stayed with him from his time as a broke, hungry
student in England, persisted into his time as a wealthy, less hungry barrister
and community leader in South Africa, and then fed into his life-work as the
tallest leader of the Indian nationalist movement. South Africa, a country he
called home for over two decades, was to prove Gandhi’s laboratory: it is where
his experiments with diet, direct non-violent action, civil disobedience, truth
or soul force (satyagraha), brahmacharya, caste-less living et al first began. Prime
among these was the elevation of walking from an individual activity into an
act rife with political significance in the public sphere: think about the Great
March of 1913[1].
It involved 2,221 men, women and children (striking Indian miners – indentured labourers
- and their families) walking, if they weren’t arrested or ‘deported’ en route,
from Newcastle in Natal province to Tolstoy Farm in Johannesburg, in the
Transvaal region.

In the Indian context, I can do little better than to point
you towards the apogee of Gandhi’s political life which came in the form of the
Dandi March (1930)[2]
and salt satyagraha that followed it. This man knew the power of walking as a
collective act, not to mention, a symbolic one. An astute semiotician, he knew
how to occupy symbols well. Gandhi realised that walking roots and grounds one
like no other activity does. Further, it allows the walk-er to be seen as much
as it allows her to see – to survey, learn, take in from – her surroundings.
This aspect of walking-as-spectacle came to the fore during the Dandi March,
but the old man had himself wandered (and covered) the length and breadth of
India prior to this, and several times over, in a bid to make himself real to
the “masses” he was slowly in the process of crafting into a people. During the Harijan Yatras of the 1930s, given that he was
already in his 60s, he no longer walked as much as he once did, but took trains
instead. It is said he bled between stations because his skin was chafed from
being touched by the thousands of people who turned up to see him, to partake
of the magic of the mahatma, everywhere he went. No smoke and mirrors here;
there was no room for distance or obfuscation at such close quarters. Those who
saw him went away knowing that their leader was as real as they were; wrought of
blood and sinew as they were – as human as they were. This inspired faith and
belief in his ability to negotiate for them the treacherous terrain that was
dealing with the implacable Imperial government.

The Nehruvian era that followed – the dawn of independent
India as it were – was configured around the tenet that nation-building was
work which took serious doing. A patriot was a producer; one who contributed to
the very real task of keeping together this newly hewn nation-state. The
leaders were still visible, more or less accessible, and the country seemed to
shimmer serenely in the after-glow of the nationalist movement. This period was
also characterised by the performance of that rite of passage which marks the
most intimate ritual of any democracy: participating in the first set of elections
in modern India. If the civic engagement so central to this era has waned since,
and with it the sense of a patriot as one who works to build – and keep – a nation,
it almost certainly has something to do with the euphemistically titled ‘structural
reforms’ unleashed upon the Indian economy at the behest of the World Bank in
1991. The ‘opening’ of the economy has led, among other things, to the shift
from patriot-as-producer to patriot-as-consumer (including of narratives such
as nationalism itself), and has in the process dismantled the moral imperative upon the nation-state to engage in social welfare (visible in how much ground the State
has ceded of what it once occupied in health and education as
sectors). This makes it vital to ask, does democracy mean to-day what once it did?
If not, what are the new contours of this idea? In a country where leaders are mere
holograms – simulated and see-through – and can no longer walk among us
(something about security concerns, they say: it would have been fun trying to
have this conversation with Gandhi or Nehru or Patel or even Jinnah, no?), how
can there be anything but trust deficit in leadership? For example, consider
that the last Indian general elections in 2014 saw the BJP sweep to a thumping victory
despite the fact that their vote share (the lowest for any single party which
has won such a majority in Parliament[3])
was merely 31%. This is indicative of a splintered polity, and it begins with
the very real problem of disconnection between so-called political leaders and
the lived reality of the citizens they are meant to represent.

Am I suggesting that all is doom and gloom? Possibly. Heaven
knows I often feel cynical enough to entertain this possibility. How do we
raise and nurture our young – those that Kofi Annan once called the “lifeline”
of any nation – into a sentient and sapient citizenry? How do we begin to
tackle the problem of trust deficit in political (and corporate, but that’s
almost the same thing as we know only too well) leadership? By walking again, I
hold. By walking again so we know the land and its inhabitants: the land will
learn leaders as leaders learn it back. We need less opaque governance and more
accountability, which sounds too obvious to actually need stating, and yet here
we are, living in a grossly unequal society, where not everyone can access the
categories ‘citizen’ or ‘rights’ in equal measure. Programmes like Swaraj Abhiyan’s
proposed rural immersion programme for students, or the Legislative Assistants
to Members of Parliament (LAMP[4])
Fellowship are instances of interventions which seek to reduce the spaces
between us, but over and over again I can only come back to the idea I started
this post with. Nivedita Menon says that a nation is a daily plebiscite[5],
and if we are to reclaim it for ourselves, it begins with knowing and naming
this nation over and over. And to know it, we must walk it together again.